Events Calendar

MASCLE Machine Learning Seminar: William Wang (UCSB) – Learning to Generate Language and Actions with Structured Agents

Speaker: William Wang, University of California, Santa Barbara

Talk Title: Learning to Generate Language and Actions with Structured Agents

Series: Machine Learning Seminar Series

Abstract: A major challenge in Natural Language Processing is to teach machines to generate natural language and actions. However, existing deep learning approaches to language generation do not impose structural constraints in the generation process, often producing low-quality results. In this context, we will introduce our attempt of imposing structural constraints for video captioning via hierarchical reinforcement learning. Moreover, we observe that most of the automated metrics for generation could be gamed, and therefore, we propose an adversarial reward learning method to automatically learn the reward via inverse reinforcement learning. Furthermore, I will discuss our recent attempts in connecting language and vision to actions via a language grounding task for robot navigation, and introduce new algorithms on scheduled policy optimization and combining model-free and model-based reinforcement learning. I will conclude by introducing other exciting research projects at UCSB's NLP Group.

This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.


Biography: William Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his PhD from School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University in 2016. He has broad interests in machine learning approaches to data science, including natural language processing, statistical relational learning, information extraction, computational social science, dialogue, and vision. He directs UCSB's NLP Group (nlp.cs.ucsb.edu): in two years, UCSB advanced in the NLP area from an undefined ranking position to top 3 in 2018 according CSRankings.org. He has published more than 60 papers at leading NLP/AI/ML conferences and journals, and received best paper awards (or nominations) at ASRU 2013, CIKM 2013, and EMNLP 2015, a DARPA Young Faculty Award (Class of 2018), two IBM Faculty Awards in 2017 and 2018, a Facebook Research Award in 2018, an Adobe Research Award in 2018, and the Richard King Mellon Presidential Fellowship in 2011. He served as an Area Chair for NAACL, ACL, EMNLP, and AAAI. He is an alumnus of Columbia University, Yahoo! Labs, Microsoft Research Redmond, and University of Southern California. In addition to research, William enjoys writing scientific articles that impact the broader online community: his microblog @王威廉 has 110,000+ followers and more than 2,000,000 views each month. His work and opinions appear at major international tech media outlets such as Wired, VICE, Fast Company, NASDAQ, The Next Web, Law.com, and Mental Floss.


Host: Yan Liu, USC Machine Learning Center

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Computer Science Department